Silencing in Thai (was: Lao classification)

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Patrick Chew <patchew@...> wrote:

> Richard Wordingham wrote:

> When dealing with Pali-Sanskrit loans, I've always enjoyed the temple
> names in Thailand to be great examples of how things aren't always what
> they seem... especially the instances of vowel rounding after labials
> (cf. your "Saturn" example.)
>
> Well... re: Thai and the virama... technically they do... it's just

not

> used in much and not in currency for much other than Buddhist
> transliterations, I think. After all, there is the codepoint U+0E3A
> (phinthu = Pali virama), and the thanthakhat (U+0E4C) has cancellation
> properties like the virama/pulli, etc. etc. etc...

Phinthu's also used in dictionaries, but as you say, it's hardly in
common use, which is why I emphasises the word. Thanthakhat is rather
different, as it silences consonants, occasionally taking a vowel out
as well. Where does thanthakhat come from? Come to that, why is the
final vowel of Sankrit -a stems deleted word-finally?

> ps: How are you encoding your posts? UTF-8? the Thai came out as
> mojibake for me...

I've little idea. I post and reply via the archive rather than via
e-mail. The archive's format seems to be Latin-1, but that may just
be the browser's default. In this case I cut and pasted from a
TIS-620 page. The text is perfectly readable in the archive if I
switch the encoding to TIS-620 or one of its supersets. That suggests
that it was sent as TIS-620 tagged as Latin-1. (The concept doesn't
faze me; at one point I was regularly FTPing binary object files in
ASCII mode, as binary mode corrupted them. I've yet to work out why
Notepad on my home PC thinks ANSI means TIS-620!)

Richard.